Monday, March 16, 2009

I also got to design one of the capital ships that the bad guys use in our cinematics for halowars. It was a lot of fun sketching this up, especially since I don't often get the opportunity to draw sci-fi vehicles very often (on account of Chuk, Hugo, and Francisco being so good at drawing them!)...

Halo Wars just came out, so now I can show the world how I almost completely defaced one of the icons of video-gaming history: Halo's Arbiter. Here are a few of the sketches I drew trying to sort of re-invent the character for our cinematics. I remember thinking this guy looked pretty hokey in halo 2...especially for what a bad-ass he was supposed to be. I mean, who is he trying to impress with his parrot-beak helmet anyway? So Dave Wilson, who is an animation supervisor here at Blur, and I set about trying to "cool him up".

The first round of sketches yielded this radical departure from the established arbiter. He has this kind of funky "claw cape" thing on his back, and his helmet snaps shut to completely conceal his face. Also, Dave thought it would be cool to change up the weapon a bit and give him some sort of a halberd thing, so I flipped around that plasma sword thingy from the game and made it into some sort of axe...

Ultimately, this version was deemed too far from the original concept, so I tried to reign it in a bit, and ended up with this:

it was still too different from the original, so I made a few more modifications, but tried to jazz it up with a cape and a retractable face-guard...

This was still not close enough to the original arbiter, so we ultimately made it look almost exactly like the one from halo 2...wah wah! But I still got to supe-up his laser sword and make it look kind of like those old-timey decorative sword-hilts...